Bill Clinton proves doubters wrong again

Updated 6:55 pm, Saturday, September 8, 2012

UC Berkeley spent $321 million to rebuild Memorial Stadium, but its location makes it a tough sell to out-of-towners.

UC Berkeley spent $321 million to rebuild Memorial Stadium, but its location makes it a tough sell to out-of-towners.

Photo: Thearon W. Henderson, Getty Images

Bill Clinton proves doubters wrong again

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Bill Clinton, a.k.a. the "comeback kid," is back and as big as ever.

Clinton will be the surrogate for President Obama in every one of the swing states - Colorado, Nevada, Ohio and Pennsylvania and the others - where a big Democratic turnout is imperative for the party to hang onto the White House.

What a change. It was only four years ago that the party powerful saw Clinton as tarnished goods.

Nancy Pelosi, who for whatever reason was never a Clinton person, had locked up the superdelegates for Obama, effectively ending Hillary Rodham Clinton's candidacy. Bill was hustled in and out of the Denver convention as fast as possible. Obama wasn't even in town for his speech.

This time, he was up on stage hugging him.

At least Obama is smart enough to understand what an effective weapon Clinton can be in the next two months.

As for what the Clintons get out of the deal?

Hillary gets first crack at 2016, win, lose or draw this time around.

Now that's redemption.

People have been asking me to compare Obama's speaking style to Clinton's.

Obama starts out professorial. He appears to be talking just an inch or so over the audience's head. It isn't until the close that he kicks into the cadence of the black minister and really engages with the crowd.

Clinton, on the other hand, understands from the start how to use the microphone. He's conversational. He's not trying to sell the whole room - he seems to be talking just with you.

It's a trick I learned early on. Pick out someone and talk to him or her directly.

With me, it was usually a good-looking woman.

Cal's newly redone Memorial Stadium makes no sense to me.

Why spend all those millions fixing up a stadium that is in one of the least-accessible spots in the Bay Area?

Don't get me wrong - the stadium is beautiful. But now, Cal is trying to piece together a complicated combination of seat sales, media broadcast rights, marketing, concessions and non-football events to pay for the $321 million rebuild.

Some of that is made more challenging by having a stadium with zero parking that out-of-towners can approach in their cars only by negotiating Berkeley's surface streets.

Tradition is great, but it doesn't pay the bills.

I ran into Tony Bennett with his family and friends at Le Central the other day. He has cousins who live in the area and was in town for a visit.

I didn't recognize him at first. He didn't look even close to 86 and the woman he was with didn't look 40.

We chatted a bit, and I can honestly say he truly does love San Francisco.

And talk about polite. People were coming up to him all through lunch and asking if they could get their picture taken with him.

He was always obliging. And so were the owners of Le Central, who made sure all the photographs had the name of the joint in the background.

Movie time: "2016: Obama's America." The basic premise here is that Obama is a psychological wreck because he was raised without a father. It doesn't work on any level - it's not a good documentary, and it's a dreary excuse for entertainment.

You'd expect it to be a tough sell around here, and you'd be right. There were probably 20 people in the theater for the 7:30 p.m. show.

"Lawless," on the other hand, is worth every second. It's a hillbilly movie set in the early 1930s in the hills of Virginia, where making moonshine is the only way to earn a living. City slickers show up and try to turn the little town into a subsidiary of the Chicago mob.

If the plot sounds familiar, it should. "Bonnie and Clyde," "The Moonshine War" - it's all been done before, but it's done well again.

Interesting how times have changed. It wasn't that long ago that everyone was interested in helping the "disadvantaged."

Not anymore.

The other day, the homeless guy who hangs out in front of Walgreens on Market Street said, "Hey, Mr. Brown, how do you get in the middle class?"

"You've been watching TV?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, "and from what I'm hearing, they're going to be getting everything in the next four years."

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